Triple Alice 1, installation Pam Lofts and photographer Juno Gemes

Tess de Quincey is a choreographer and dancer who has worked extensively in Australia and Europe as a solo performer, teacher and director. Based in Japan from 1985 until 1991, she was a dancer for 6 years with butoh artist Min Tanaka and his Mai-Juku Performance Co. which has provided the strongest influence on her work in performance.

Her major solo productions Movement on the Edge (1988-89), Another Dust (1989-92) is and is.2 (1994-95) and Nerve 9 (2001 onwards) have toured extensively in both Europe and Australia while a series of performance works done over 5 years in the ancient dry lake bed of Mungo (far western New South Wales) were the beginnings of her work in the Australian Outback. Tess is director of the ongoing TRIPLE ALICE Laboratories which bring together interdisciplinary practices of artists and scientists in relation to the Central Desert of Australia - www.triplealice.net.

Since introducing the BODY WEATHER philosophy and methodology into Australia in 1988, Tess has engendered an extensive teaching and performance practice that has had a far reaching influence on numerous practitioners within the performing arts field in both Australia and abroad. Body Weather is the basis of her work.

…dancer Tess de Quincey's surreal landscapes of the mind, written by her body across the building's carenous performing area… de Quincey’s barely perceptible movements built to such intensity that the space felt charged with electricity and some undefinable immutability and emotion.

Performance Space Highlights of 21 years
November 2004, The Sydney Morning Herald – Angela Bennie

…Tess de Quincey is a formidable artist… her intense, many-layered, intricately worked creations where the body, decentred and edgey, negotiates the mutated, arcane landscape of contemporary culture… With Nerve 9 De Quincey and her collaborators have created an epitaph for our time.

Nerve 9
February 2002, The Age (Melbourne) – Vicki Fairfax

…the 40-minute journey is as mesmerising as it is inexplicably profound. …the work is elegant, simple, complex, profound, stark, elsuive - yet never daunting. It is wonderfully easy to watch and very effecting. …a wonderful journey of shared discovery.

embrace: GUILT FRAME
March 2008, Australian Stage - James Waites

…together they are mesmerising.

February 2008, The Australian - Deborah Jones

The two faces in front of you, scarcely moving, are plunging through a sea of emotions… drawing you into an intense 40 minutes of observation and response… It is something to see - and feel.

February 2008, The Sydney Morning Herald - Jill Sykes

Tess de Quincey - more extracts from solo reviews